Simplicity is good

So my notboss is leaving to be a stay at home mom. (She's my notboss because although she's higher on the food chain than I am... she is not my boss.) And I have been having this anxiety because my biggest boss said that we are doing this thing tomorrow as a send off and we all contributed money and then he said we should do something 'like you know... funny or whatever...' I assumed that we had to spend money and was totally peeved about that until I talked to coworker and got it figured out. He didn't necessarily mean spend money... just come up with something more personal I suppose. Ok so now I've got a clue. Earlier this year I did pot painting with the kids for their moms for mother's day. I have plenty of paint and pots left over I'll make one of those. So I painted one with flowers and dragonflies that I stamped on there and I looked at it and went ew. Too busy. So I went back to the drawing board (actually I fetched another pot out of the cupboard) and started over. I painted some 'grass' and a 'sky' and then I whitewashed it so that it was paler and not quite the harsh dark colors. Then I used yellow and purple and orange little teeny tiny dots to be like flowers in a meadow. And then I used more yellow to make spots in the sky to be fireflies and then I darkened the top part of the pot so it seems like the evening is falling. It turned out ever so much better and yet was so much simpler to do.

Unrelated, I finished up a book tonight called The Widow's War by Sally Gunning. It was great! I highly recommend it. It is set in the 1700's in a whaling community on Cape Cod. A woman's husband dies (hence the Widow title I don't think I'm spilling anything) and she fights with her family to assert her rights, of which she had very little. I was really fascinated as I read through the whole thing.

I also finished up a couple of chick lit books this weekend. Those I enjoyed somewhat less.

Singletini is typical chick lit. Twenty something girl struggles in her life blah blah blah. There were definitely funny parts, though but reading about some size sub-zero's "pooch" annoyed the crap out of me. (Of course that is how 24 year olds talk so...)

The Cinderella Pact I really wanted to like. I had it on reserve for goodness sakes, I must've seen something in it that appealed. Although I liked some aspects, it was this book that caused the gripe about fat chicks in chick lit.

Sufficient Grace was the 3rd book I read recently. I rather liked this one as well. A woman is suffering from the onset of schizophrenia. She flees her family because the voices tell her to and she spends months living with an African American family, the matriarch had taken care of her many years in the past when she was a child. It was a little sad but touching. I even liked the transformation of her husband, a mechanic, into a chef even though it was probably a little unreal.